Kanye West Said Slavery Was a Choice in a TMZ Interview

Kanye West has not stopped embracing controversy. Following on his politically charged return to Twitter, he stirred up the TMZ offices in an interview on TMZ Live Tuesday morning.

Asked by TMZ founder Harvey Levin about his signed Make America Great Again hat, Kanye said, "It was really just my subconscious; it was a feeling I had." He continued, "People: we're taught how to think, taught how to feel, we don't know how to think for ourselves, we don't know how to feel for ourselves. People say 'feel free,' but they don't really want us to feel free. I felt a freedom in, first of all, just doing something that everybody tells you not to do."

"I just love Trump. That's my boy," Kanye continued, going on to address Trump's previous reputation in the hip-hop community. "So many rappers — you'll look at a video of Snoop Dogg loving Trump, but then he gets into office and they don't love him."

"Trump is one of rap's favorite people," Kanye said. He went on to address his identity as a member of the hip-hop community and the black community, but he also says he represents "the world." He then veered into comments about the history of American slavery. (On Monday, Kanye received a lesson about Abraham Lincoln and the Republican party courtesy of John Legend and Charlamagne tha God.)

"When you hear about slavery for 400 years — for 400 years! That sounds like a choice," Kanye said with a laugh. In actuality, black people really didn't have a choice. Historians have documented how some African slaves were captured following battles or kidnapped, while others were sold into slavery due to debt or as punishment. And contrary to popular belief, Abraham Lincoln didn't set out to free slaves during the Civil War; the then president himself also harbored racist views against black people.

"It's like we're mentally in prison," Kanye continued. "I like the word prison because slavery goes too direct to the idea of blacks." He also made a hasty analogy between slavery for blacks and the holocaust for Jews before saying, "So prison is something that unites us as one race, blacks and white being one race." Kanye added, "We're the human race." Critics have argued that creating an equation between American enslavement of Africans and the Holocaust of Jews is an oversimplification of two tragic but different historical situations, especially when those comparisons are used to play down the difficulties black Americans now face.

Video from TMZ's newsroom then shows Kanye asking the assembled staffers, "Do you feel that I'm being free and I'm thinking free?"

"I actually don't think you're thinking anything," TMZ staffer Van Lathan replied. "I think what you're doing right now is actually the absence of thought. And the reason why I feel like that is because, Kanye, you're entitled to your opinion, you're entitled to believe whatever you want. But there is fact and real-world, real-life consequence behind everything that you just said."

"While you are making music and being an artist and living the life that you've earned by being a genius, the rest of us in society have to deal with these threats to our lives," Lathan continued. "We have to deal with the marginalization that has come from the 400 years of slavery that you said, for our people, was a choice. Frankly, I'm disappointed. I'm appalled. And, brother, I am unbelievably hurt by the fact that you have morphed into something, to me, that's not real.